Hybrid Clouds for Desktop and Apps with Citrix and Cisco

The cloud, as we all know, continues to be a hot topic, as businesses of all sizes are figuring out how best to leverage cloud architectures to improve agility, efficiency, and end-user access. Increasingly, the answer is a hybrid cloud model – giving businesses the ability to pick and choose both on-premise and off-premise/service-provider based resources to run their workloads based on what best fits their needs.

Almost every customer I meet with these days is headed in this direction and most are actively planning a hybrid cloud strategy. In fact, over the past few years, Citrix has been working with both service providers and enterprises on their cloud transformation – and while this journey is still new, we have crossed many signifcant milestones:

Scalability: For hybrid clouds to be adopted en masse, scalability is essential. A key lesson we have learnt here is to design cloud orchestration so that you can get started quickly with one or two use-cases and reliably scale as your demands grow, without locking in to a specific workload architecture or incurring a huge management overhead. Today, Citrix cloud and virtualization technologies power some of the world’s largest clouds – Citrix CloudPlatform powered by the popular open-source Apache CloudStack is used by major service providers including British Telecom, NTT, Datapipe, Sungard, KDDI, KT, IDC Frontier, Colt, Orange, and Taiwan Mobile at datacenters across the globe, many with tens of thousands of VMs, as well as at enterprises such as Disney Interactive, SAP, Nokia, Edmunds.com, The University of Melbourne, Kyushu Univeristy, and others.

Workload Support: While most customers begin by adopting a cloud architecture for new applications that fit a scale-out cloud model such as Dev/Test, Big Data, Gaming, and Web Scale apps; they quickly want to expand beyond this to include core enterprise workloads such as Windows desktops and apps. Which is why we are very excited about the announcement today of the new Citrix Cloud Provider Pack 2 which enables the thousands of Citrix Service Providers to leverage the multi-tenancy of a cloud architecture like CloudPlatform in their DaaS architectures.

Validated Architectures: A key to accelerating time-to-market is a validated, repeatable reference architecture. A year ago, Citrix and Cisco announced an expanded partnership across the areas of networking, cloud, desktop and mobility with the goal of jointly developing solutions that will accelerate adoption with our mutual customers. Hundreds of joint customers have benefited from this relationship – customers such as the University of Sao Paulo have embraced the cloud and transformed to an IT-as-a-Service model leveraging Cisco UCS, Citrix CloudPlatform, NetScaler, XenDesktop and XenApp. We are continuing to build on this successful partnership with prescriptive, validated reference architectures between Cisco and Citrix that enable service providers to easily leverage the new Cloud Provider pack with XenDesktop, XenApp on CloudPlatform using Cisco UCS infrastructure.

We are excited to take this next step in helping customers realize the potential of hybrid clouds across all their workloads – including Desktops and Desktop Apps.